One of my greatest aims is to make Whitechapel a nexus for Desirable Information.

Memes, virals, that which makes you laugh, that which makes your bowels weep; anything found or scavenged online which has no informative value: that stuff will continue to go in “Around The Net.” I’ll be updating that once every four weeks too.

This…? This is for everything else.

News Stories. Mad Science. Horrific Nature. Metaphysical madness.

Here is where we gorge ourselves on the creamy clostrum of Information. Here is where we nuzzle at the red-raw teat of the Up-To-Date Dataweb. Bring me the light of your Weird Wisdom and your New News.

(Anything of particular interest, go ahead and create new threads in this category to delve deeper.)

In Springfield, Missouri, Reverend Phil Snyder gives an interesting speech during a city council debate about a new rule adding LGBT people to the list of minorities protected from discrimination. Just listen to it until the end, it's not what you may think :

Update @ 23:55 - Linn just contacted me to say her account has been mysteriously re-activated and she's busily downloading her books. Hopefully Amazon will have more news for us all soon. Even positive arbitrary actions disclose how much Kindle customers read only with the grace of Amazon, of course...

Thanks to Cerys Matthew's show on bbc radio 6, which is a truly outstanding way to spend two hours on a Sunday morning, I can bring you Philip Hoare's project The Moby Dick Big Read, where one person, sometimes famous sometimes not, reads each of the 135 chapters. Chapter one is by Tilda Swinton

@Flabyo - Probably because this story has been in every paper and every news bulletin in the UK for the last couple of weeks. And every time you hear about it, it involves even more people doing even more abhorrent things.

During the 1990s, Thomas Quick confessed to one unsolved murder after another, becoming, in the words of the father of one of his alleged victims, "a ghost who ran through Scandinavia killing more than 30 people". The sadistic murderer was a media sensation and his bespectacled face stared out from front pages and television screens. The newspapers called him "the cannibal". Thomas Quick became Sweden's very own Hannibal Lecter.

But then, in 2001, he stopped co-operating with the police. He withdrew from public view and changed his name back to the one he was born with. In 2008, Hannes Råstam, one of Sweden's most respected documentary-makers, became intrigued. He visited the former Thomas Quick, now known as Sture Bergwall, at Säter, trawled through the 50,000 pages of court documents, therapy notes and police interrogations and came to the startling conclusion that there was not a single shred of technical evidence for any of Bergwall's convictions. There were no DNA traces, no murder weapons, no eyewitnesses – nothing apart from his confessions, many of which had been given when he was under the influence of narcotic-strength drugs. Confronted with Råstam's discoveries, Bergwall admitted the unthinkable. He said he had fabricated the entire story.